‘Nanette’ Is Not a TED Talk — TED Talks Are a Failed Version of ‘Nanette’

As Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up continues earning praise, more and more people compare it to the popular lectures. But let’s not ignore that what ‘Nanette’ is both predates and surpasses TED.

There are different points at which different people break while watching ‘Nanette’, Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix comedy special that has been filling your supposed liberal echo chamber with a unanimous crowd cheer for the past month. In fact, most of us seem to break several times during the last ten minutes or so. It’s admittedly a strange thing, talking about which part of a stand-up show emotionally wrecked you the most. Then again, ‘Nanette’ is being referred to as the stand-up to end them all, or at least to end the most common subspecies of stand-up out there.

For me personally, the hardest punch comes when Gadsby says — with disarming certainty and almost in passing — “I will never flourish”. Out of all the moments of raw honesty, that sentence was the one that truly caught me off guard on my first viewing. It was by far not the only sentiment in the show that I identified with, but it was the one that echoed a truth I’d been suppressing in the name of a healthy outlook on life, or frankly maybe just to be able to get up in the morning.

Before Nanette came along, I’d read a decent number of self-help books, mostly on the topics that Gadsby covers in her special — introversion, feelings of never fitting in, trauma resulting from sexual abuse, internalised body shame and hate towards my own identity. I appreciate each and every one of the people who wrote those books. Some of them even started by saying outright “This book will not change your life” or even “This is not a self-help book”, despite having their work inevitably categorised as such by the all-wise invisible hand of Amazon.

I actually remember thinking on several occasions how absurd it was of me to keep buying them if almost none of them made a noticeable difference in my life. I’m pretty sure a lot of us feel that way, but we keep trying again and again and hoping for a burst of enlightenment. Maybe the only sort of people who genuinely believe in the intrinsic power of self-help books are those with Platinum Audible membership who listen to everything at three-times the normal speed until they presumably choke on their own personal growth.

I have the same suspicion about those who enjoy watching endless TED Talks, a format which ‘Nanette’ is being repeatedly compared to, particularly by people who doubt its legitimacy as comedy. Don’t get me wrong — you do learn stuff from a TED Talk. Amazing, exceptional, knowledgeable people give TED Talks. I also realise it is very arrogant of me to call TED Talks a failure. For one thing, I’ve never done a TED Talk myself, which means I’m not one to — well, talk. But there’s no denying that TED Talks are by definition extremely simplified. They reduce specialised and complex knowledge into soundbites and present it to a crowd of people who take momentary interest. You watch one or two, you feel inspired to change the world. You watch three, four, five, and the impulse to make a real change is slowly replaced by a warm feeling of “bettering yourself” and “possessing information”, even if you do bugger all with it. That’s the problem with self-betterment and edu-porn. We’ve created a whole industry where Tony Robbins bumps shoulders with a neuroscientist and neither of them make your consciousness tingle for any significant length of time anymore.

Part of the reason why most motivational content doesn’t help you very much is that in some shape or form, you already know what it’s telling you from other books, from the countless articles you click on Facebook, and even from your personal experience. At this point, you need something stronger. What you’re probably truly looking for is not simply advice, it’s something that will alter your mindset and rewire your brain because the way it’s been operating up to this point is proving ineffective in some important respect. You’re looking for an update to your firmware — not just a manual and not a temporary fix. Something that would become a part of your system. And that’s an almost impossible task. Not even drugs can do that for you, mostly. It is an almost impossible task which — in order to aim for that fraction of possibility — needs to involve an extraordinary load of emotion.

I don’t know yet if ‘Nanette’ has updated my brain. Gadsby performed the show over 250 times and she admits that she herself doesn’t know what exactly it has done to her. All that’s certain is that ‘Nanette’ definitely provides that emotional punch.

Hannah Gadsby is beyond frustrated. She’s done pretending that the things that happened to her are just a fact of life, and she’s done playing along. She refuses to belittle herself to make others comfortable. The second half of her show expresses a deep frustration shared by thousands, because it’s the frustration of the people who are constantly asked to adapt to a world that treats them with hostility. Somehow the onus always seems to be on the person who was hurt — do something about it, find the right treatment and heal yourself. Go to therapy, and when that’s not working, find a different therapist. It’s your life, so take control of it. And, most disturbingly, “you can’t expect others to love you if you don’t love yourself first”. We are taught self-hate and then we’re told that it’s the one thing stopping us from achieving happiness.

There are of course self-help narratives that acknowledge this and try to focus on retaining as much mental strength as possible under the circumstances. While that might be the most practical approach, it still doesn’t feel sufficiently far from what Gadsby’s mother said when apologising for her initial reaction to her daughter’s coming-out: “I tried to make you change, because I knew the world wouldn’t”. You have to cope somehow, but it inevitably becomes exhausting, depressing, and hard to sustain. The line between coping and hiding can be pretty thin.

The reality is that “not-normals” are collectively fed up with trying. Gadsby is right — we’re tired. We’re angry and tired, we’re hurting and tired. A TED Talk won’t do. We need to be allowed to roar, give way to the rage and pepper it with all the “fucks” it calls for. And that’s exactly what Hannah Gadsby did. The uniqueness of her show lies in the fact that she took the tradition of pain, profanity, anger, and trauma-induced loneliness shouted from tiny stages at poetry slams and placed it where it doesn’t belong, where it’s not supposed to be. She took something that is only allowed to exist in places where it can be dismissed, and molded it to fill the Sydney Opera House. (And she put a rimming joke in the middle of it, in case anyone’s still unsure whether ‘Nanette’ clears the bar for a comedy special.) Her argument about jokes freezing stories at their trauma point is simple yet poignant, but it wouldn’t have this impact on any other forum, in any other form. It’s the combination of TED-like front with the non-TED language that does the trick.

‘Nanette’ also doesn’t provide the sort of closure that TED Talks do. As per conference-speaker wisdom, lectures on innovation and change should answer three basic questions: “What?”, “So what?”, and “Now what?” The aim of this structure is to familiarise the audience with a problem, explain why the audience should care about the problem, and finally present a solution that would fix the problem, provided that the audience — and the world — takes action. There are obviously TED Talks that deviate from this model or go light on the third part, but you practically never come across one that deliberately leaves behind an open wound, a realisation that something of yours was irretrievably lost to you.

I am not accusing Gadsby of hurting her audience for her own enjoyment, I’m saying she doesn’t attempt to relieve the pain. Despite her stating that stories hold cure to our trauma, there is no mellowing send-off, nothing that would soothe you and placate you enough to leave this experience in some sort of a calm pondering. ‘Nanette’ very deliberately messes you up and doesn’t attempt to come up with specific solutions. That is not its point. Hannah Gadsby simply says “I quit” and you kind of want to quit with her.

For those who still think ‘Nanette’ tries to pander to progressive audiences at the expense of “real jokes”: Let’s not forget that all comedy is about reassurance. You can talk about so-called “clapter” all you want (and Hershal Pandya explains in this article why that might not be a useful way to spend your time), but the truth is that laughter depends on a shared point of view. If the majority of any given set was challenging to the majority of the crowd present, the comic would most likely bomb. It’s just that until recently, comedy centered around the point of view shared by mostly white cis straight men, and the rest of us were joining in partly out of self-hate and partly for self-preservation.

I’m only a few years younger than Gadsby, and I’m not asking for solutions anymore. We know what’s needed to fix the problem she talks about for good — unfortunately, that’s never going to happen. But progress is still possible. Things can be improved. I might never flourish, but I know my life is not worthless. And ‘Nanette’ told me I don’t have the responsibility to heal myself, which is more than any TED Talk ever did.